Study reveals secrets of our postcode

[TrueBlueTerrier]

http://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/mai ... -1-6572669" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

A study of areas by their postcode has identified characteristics such as the lowest crime rates, most married couples and best for health.

The Royal Mail commissioned the Centre for Economic and Business Research to conduct an analysis to mark the 40th anniversary of the allocation of postcodes to every town in the country.

The research found that London has the five healthiest areas in England, but also the highest outstanding mortgages; Somerton and Frome in the West Country have the lowest unemployment rates; Northumberland and West Cumbria the lowest crime rates; and Poole the highest proportion of married couples.

Other findings include Canterbury in Kent having the lowest birthrate of any postcode area, and the Isles of Scilly having the fewest cars per household.

Steve Rooney, head of Royal Mail’s address management
unit, said: “Royal Mail’s study provides a fascinating insight into the characteristics of communities the length and breadth of the UK through the lens of the postcode.”

[TrueBlueTerrier]

New postcode data will do little to dispel our ingrained street snobbery

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre ... d-snobbery" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Royal Mail's postcode snooping is letting us into secrets such as Surrey having the highest outstanding mortgage rates. Tell me something I didn't know

The notion of the postcode lottery is alive and well in Britain today. Tales about children who live next door to the local school being sent 20 miles down the road in four separate buses because they're just outside a catchment area are abound every September, and claims last month that ambulance crew delays according to postcode could be costing 2,500 lives a year caused widespread tutting and shaking of heads. This time, however, it's slightly happier – or at least more intriguing – news: Royal Mail research has found that they can pretty much predict everything about you by your postcode, and they're letting you in on the secret.

According to the newly released data, everything from the amount of children you have to the number of cars you own has been nosed into by the mail service. The study, which commemorates the 40th anniversary of the postcode, focused on five key features of our lives: health and wellbeing, jobs and work, the cost of living, crime and security, and marriage and birth rates. So, looking for high employment rates? Move to Somerset. Need neighbours with the highest amount of qualifications? Birmingham it is. Getting married? Poole's your place for guaranteed double dates with other wedded couples. Avoiding crime? Northumberland, West Cumbria and Shetland beckon. Or perhaps you want to be really healthy but perpetually in debt? Good morning, London.

But let's face it: apart from the odd surprise – I'll admit to being blindsided by the surprisingly robust jobs sector in the West Country, having once signed on there myself – this research tells us very little that we couldn't have already guessed. I may not be completely au fait with the intricacies of life in Aldeburgh, but knowing as I do now that it's a pleasant coastal town in Suffolk, I can believe it has the highest average age of residents in the UK. And it doesn't exactly cast me into spasms of shock that Surrey has one of the highest outstanding mortgage rates.

Postcode snobbery is very much an integral part of modern Britain; before it existed, we had snobbery-by-county, but the last 40 years have given us the gift of zeroing in on particular streets. It's not uncommon to find houses that jump in price where the postcode becomes a little more prestigious, distinguishing it completely arbitrarily from the identical property three doors down. And in London in particular, your postcode can be a serious point of pride or contention: just look at the title of Zadie Smith's latest novel NW, which followed a musical group of Londoners calling themselves N-Dubz after the same postcode.

Because so many of us, regardless of age or class, have assimilated our postcodes into our identities, they already carry their own well-developed stereotypes. The latest Royal Mail findings can only contribute to the self-fulfilling prophecies that surround these assignment of numbers and letters: while planning a move to WR7 (Worcester), you'll have to pre-emptively arrange for more than one family car. Become a resident of N1 (Islington), and you might live in a flat with no heating above a noisy main road, but goddammit, you're going to eat quinoa.

Does it help to have even more data at hand on the average person's wage and job security in any given postcode? Of course not. Does it make social mobility look depressingly hard and simplify the lives of diverse communities? Sure.

Quantitative data is clumsy, and 99% of us know that. But I'm willing to bet my next vegan kale burger that landlords are already jacking up their rents in Northumberland.

[TrueBlueTerrier]

Luton named in top UK postcodes for fertility in Royal Mail survey

http://www.bedfordshire-news.co.uk/News ... 042014.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;?

Luton postcode areas have been named as the 8th most fertile district of the country in a new survey comissioned by Royal Mail.
The survey found that LU1 - LU4 postcodes were in the top ten areas for births per 1,00 women aged between 16-44.



The survey also found that London has the five healthiest areas by postcode sector in England (SW1X, EC2V, W8, SW7 and EC1A).

North of the border, the healthiest postcode sectors in Scotland are Langholm (DG13) and Gretna (DG16). In Wales it is Cynderwen in Dyfed (SA66) and in Northern Ireland it is Hillsbrough (BT26).

The area with the highest average age in the UK was revealed to be in the Suffolk coastal town of Aldeburgh (IP15).

Somerton and Frome in the West Country have found to have the lowest unemployment rates in the UK,while Birmingham has the top ranked postcode sector outside London for highest qualified residents.

According to the survey, the areas with the highest outstanding mortgages in the UK are London and Surrey and postcode sectors in the City of London, Coldstream in Northumberland and the Isle of Islay, Scotland, have some of the highest average personal loan values in the UK.

Northumberland and West Cumbria were found to have the lowest crime rates in England. In Scotland it is Shetland (ZE2), in Wales it is Clarbeston Road in Dyfed (SA63) and in Northern Ireland it is Craigavon (BT67)

The postcode with the highest proportion of married couples was Poole whille Canterbury has the postcode sector with the lowest birth rate.

Locally, Cambridge was third in the lowest 10 UK districts for general fertility rate and Saffron Walden appeared in the top 10 areas with the lowest unemployment rate.

About postcodes in the UK

The first postcodes in the UK were trialled in Norwich in 1959, designed to overcome the problems of labour intensive letter sorting by reducing addresses to machine readable code.

In 1966, an eight year programme to postcode the whole country began which was completed in 1974 with the recoding of Norwich.

Today, there are around 1.8 million postcodes in use across the whole of the UK, covering 29 million adresses.

The combination of letters and numbers was chosen because it was found that people found it easier to remember a mixture of numbers and letters more easily than a list of numbers while also giving more code combinations.

Optical recognition machines read the postcodes and automatically convert them to phosphor dots. These are in turn read by the sorting machines whichcan sort correctly addressed and postcoded letters 20 times faster than by hand.

The average number of residential addressed each postcode covers is 17 and Royal Mail's online Postcode Finder is one of the UK's most used webspages with about 100,000 visits per day which amounts to in excess of 40 million a year.

[VforVendetta]

Phosphor dots. Old school. Don't think they have been around since the PHG's stopped typing them.